Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (The Neapolitan Novels, #3)

by Elena Ferrante

I wanted to acknowledge openly that she had understood everything since she was a girl, without ever leaving Naples.

Maybe, I thought, by acting as if my money belonged to her she wants to convince me that I myself belong to her, and that, even if I get married, I will belong to her forever.

For at least ten years the God of childhood, already fairly weak, had been pushed aside like an old sick person, and I felt no need for the sanctity of marriage. The essential thing was to get out of Naples.

I still cared more about Lila than about any other person, but I couldn’t make up my mind to see her.

“I’ll see later.” “You’d better.” “I’ll do what I can.” “You have to do the maximum.” “I’ll try.”

“The pregnancy, the birth. Adele is beautiful, and very good.” She answered: “Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.”

What seduced me instead was an urge for authenticity that I had never felt and that perhaps was not in my nature.

Lila, I said to myself, deliberately pushes away emotions, feelings. The more I sought tools to try to explain myself to myself, the more she, on the contrary, hid. The more I tried to draw her into the open and involve her in my desire to clarify, the more she took refuge in the shadows. She was like the full moon when it crouches behind the forest and the branches scribble on its face.

Hers was a life in motion, mine was stopped.

Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me, but I realized it for the first time only in that situation. I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition. I had wanted to become something—here was the point—only because I was afraid that Lila would become someone and I would stay behind. My becoming was a becoming in her wake. I had to start again to become, but for myself, as an adult, outside of her.

he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn’t want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be if he were a woman. For Franco, I said, I was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it: I constituted the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he knew how to be not only a man in the right way but also a woman. And today when he no longer senses me as part of himself, he feels betrayed.